Monday, July 21, 2014

New movie review: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Caesar, played by Andy Serkis, commands his fellow apes in the opening scene of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

The most impressive aspect of Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the summer’s best popcorn flick by
a wide margin, is its courage to stand on the strength of its convictions. Building
on the foundation set by 2011’s Rise of
the Planet of the Apes, Reeves and writers Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, and
Amanda Silver construct a world of political intrigue, harrowing violence, and difficult
choices – effectively mirroring our reality in more ways than they could have
known at the time.

After the title sequence explains what transpired between the end of
the first film and the beginning of this one – the flu-like virus that sparked
the apes’ intelligence has wiped out most of humanity – the audience is dropped
square in the middle of a new and unfamiliar world. The apes Caesar led into
Muir Woods at the end of Rise have
built a utopian enclave in which they are free to live as they see fit,
blissfully unaware of whether any humans survived the simian flu or not. Some
did.

The filmmakers then make the daring choice to focus their story on the
apes. This $170 million tent pole takes as its subject a band of rebel apes
rather than the inhabitants of one of the last outposts of human civilization.
It is a brave, bold decision, and it is also the correct decision. The broad
strokes are there in the title. This is the story of how the Planet of the Apes
came to be, not of how the humans put up one hell of a fight.

But one could easily envision that version of the movie, a version in
which the humans fight to preserve or rather to reclaim their dominance – their
dominion over the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea, as it were. In this
hypothetical iteration of the film, the heroes would be Jason Clarke, Gary
Oldman, and Keri Russell. They play the human protagonists whose attempts to
restore power via a hydroelectric dam in the apes’ territory kick off the
events of the plot.

There would be action galore and thrills aplenty. The movie would
entertain. It would appeal to our desire to escape for a while into a dark,
cool theater and watch actors play out an enjoyable fantasy. It would be a fun
and diverting experience, as pleasant as reading a paperback at the beach. But
it would not be a great film. This is a great film, opting to concern itself
with ideas, politics, war, and our very humanity. It does not sidestep these
concepts but confronts them head on and is better for it.

The star is Andy Serkis as Caesar, who has fought and won everything he
ever wanted and now must struggle to hold onto it against threats from within
and without. Midway through the first film, Caesar poses the question: “What is
Caesar?” Ten years on, it is clear he still grapples with this, and the events
of Dawn force him to face who he is
and what that means. He is a super-intelligent ape raised by humans and
possessing what we might consider an essential humanness. But what the world
sees, both the humans and his kin, is an ape.

In this way, film’s technological prowess and Serkis’ brilliant
performance coalesce into a beautifully resonant expression of theme. The
visual effects bring the apes to life in ways never before possible, and the
actors, Serkis in particular, imbue them with something at once raw and
refined, human and transcendent.

It is a metaphor proposed by the film itself: Technology made these
apes what they are, but it cannot change the core of who they are. Serkis is
able to portray an ape because of advances in digital effects, but he is able
to portray Caesar because he is a gifted actor, and that is what a complex,
flawed, thinking, feeling being such as Caesar requires.

As Caesar wrestles with the internal dilemma of what he is and what he
needs to be, his external world begins to crumble. He wishes to allow the
humans into ape territory so that they may restore power with the promise of
peace. Detractors within his camp see this as Caesar giving in to a long-held
desire to be accepted as human rather than the measured actions of someone with
a clear view of the future.

Caesar envisions a world in which humans and apes peacefully co-exist,
and he sees the sacrifices that must be made on both sides to achieve this aim.
But it is the fate of all those capable of seeing both sides of an issue to be
accused of lacking conviction and the tragedy of the masses to fall under the
spell of the accusers. There is something visceral in righteous indignation
that well-reasoned moral centrism cannot match, and thus beings the war.

The last 45 minutes or so of this two-hour-plus movie constitute a
well-conceived and admirably executed action picture. The battles are stunning
feats of visual construction predicated upon epic acts of city-wide destruction,
including one long take with a camera mounted on a tank that is among the best
I have ever seen. Yet, the virtuosity of the action would mean nothing without
the deeply rooted emotional conflicts at its core.

Here is an action film with more on its mind than violence and nihilism.
That alone is an achievement of which it is worth standing up and taking notice.
More impressive is that it is able to take those preoccupations and translate
them into an entertaining, thought-provoking thriller that achieves a balance
of political realism and guarded optimism. The future Caesar longs for may be
clouded by the settling dust of war, but it remains in sight, a beacon of a
bright, new tomorrow.